Script Or Budget, Which Comes First? by Producer John Paul Rice

Film Courage: What comes first the budget or the script?
John Paul Rice, movie producer: Script. The script dictates the budget. The script is your heart and soul, the spine of the whole thing that you’re going to build off of the foundation of everything that you’re going to lay on top of it. If you have money first and you’re writing to the budget of that, I think your creativity is paramount.
And dealing within the realities of what resources are available to you and then you start talking about money and how you’re going to fulfill that vision but if the vision is coming from a monetary…me personally…I’ve had more money on some of my other films, it didn’t mean I did a better job producing.
In fact my third film MOTHER’S RED DRESS, I had more money than any of the other ones and it was my worst job producing.
Film Courage: Why?
John: Because I thought that by having more money to pay more money to each position and person that was working on it, I was just going to get better talent and therefore I took my better part of myself out of the equation, just thinking that it was going to be solved by money. And I learned a very valuable lesson on that.
We got the film done and everything was great and it worked out fine. But I saw dollars and that I could get this kind of DP and it didn’t translate into success for the project.
In fact the person that I brought on once that DP left the project for another project (in the middle of shooting), I brought in somebody else that had less equipment, less experience and he did a fantastic job because his motivation was correct.
So if you look at…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
